Pretranslating Documents

Pretranslation is a powerful way to accelerate the translation process by having Lilt automatically translate segments for you. Pretranslation leverages a document's associated Lilt Memory to translate Exact or ICE matches. In this way, Pretranslation can also be used as a preparatory tool to gauge how much of a document's text comprises new words. Pretranslation can optionally be used to populate Machine Translation (MT) suggestions into segments with no TM matches.

How Pretranslation works

When Pretranslating a document, Lilt scans the entire document and populates segments where the source text is an Exact or ICE match with a TM entry in the Project's associated Lilt Memory. These translated segments are marked as confirmed and are attributed to the user who made the original TM entry in the associated Lilt Memory.

If Pretranslation is run after any translation work has been done, Lilt ignores any already confirmed segments, regardless of whether the prior translation was done by Pretranslation or a human translator.

How to use Pretranslation

To use pretranslation, find the desired document within a Project. On the document's card, open the Document Options menu by clicking on the three-dot icon on the right ..., and then click Pretranslate.

For multiple documents, select the desired documents within a Project and then click the Pretranslate button that appears (as described in the Bulk Document Actions article).

Once the Pretranslation popup opens, you can select any additional translation options you want to use:

The additional options are as follows:

• Attribute translation authorship of exact matches to [current user]: All translated segments with exact matches will be attributed to the current user who is running Pretranslation, regardless of attribution within the associated Lilt Memory.
• Accept and lock exact matches:
  • If selected, segments with Exact or ICE matches:
    • are confirmed in Translate mode
    • locked from editing in Translate mode (moving the segment out-of-scope)
    • accepted in Review mode; reviewers are still able to make edits to these segments in Review mode without needing to unaccept the segment
  • If not selected, Exact or ICE match segments:
    • are confirmed in Translate mode, but can be edited without needing to unconfirmed the segment
    • remain unlocked in Translate mode, leaving them in-scope
    • and are not marked as accepted in Review mode

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• Use case sensitive translation memory matching: This option forces Lilt to only translate Exact or ICE matches that also match letter casing.
• Use MT for unmatched segments: Segments that do not have an exact TM match will be translated with Machine Translation (MT). Segments translated in this way are not marked as confirmed, whereas segments translated from Exact or ICE matches are marked as confirmed.

Once you have selected the desired options (if any), click the Pretranslate button to begin translating the documents. The documents being translated will display a spinner icon and the text "Pre-translating" while they are being processed. Once finished processing, the spinner icon and "Pre-translating" text will go away.